Finished Quilt

Here's the finished quilt. Its about 4 feet square. Turned out pretty good I think. :)

This years carrot and cauliflower pickles and the zucchini relish. Good stuff!

New quilt

I'm working on a new quilt, to hang on the stairs, above the entryway. See, we need a quilt there because the dogs, or the cat, always open the upstairs bathroom door, when someone is in the bath tub, and then that door, and consequently the bath tub, look straight out onto the driveway and highway. Not so fun. So I've been working on this project for a few years, and I'm finally getting back to is. The outer blocks are done, and as of today the center panel is done. A few borders, and some connecting work, and it'll be done. But for now, here is the center panel. I cut out, and appliqued and embroidered it all. The mountain is about 5 shades of purple fabric (batik), and its embroidered in a hollowshimmer thread so it sparkles. Very fun! Can't wait to finish it this week.

Up close of the leaves, with Mya in the back

I love the colors!

Such pretty leaves

The mountain ash in the back of the garden The mountain ash in the front yard

Up close of the tree in front

The front tree again

Our pretty blue spruce. I love the blue tips

Here I am holding the biggest Rhubarb leaf I have ever seen!

This is our new raspberry patch. Should do great next year!

Here's the garden after got it all planted

Dad tilling the back yard, so he could plant it to grasses and clover. Clearly the goose loves company - or maybe not so much

Our garden growing. We got a lot of dill this year too, which was nice. And radishes, and some celery that was not so good, the stalks weren't big enough, and it was a little intense. Oh, and we got a bunch of potatoes, but I think I showed them earlier.

Broccolli

I read this story, shortly after dad and I planted the broccolli plants for the year. It said that if you want enough broccolli for a family of four, to eat fresh in the summer, you need to plant 4-6 plants; if you want broccolli for the family to last all summer, and to put away for the winter, you need 10-12 plants. And I thought, hmmm, this could be a problem, since we planted 142 broccolli plants. We eat a LOT of broccolli, and its something we all enjoy a lot. So here's one of our broccolli harvests. Not the only one of course, but it was the largest, and the last big harvest. We enjoyed some fresh, and some really great fresh broccolli salad (fresh broccolli flowers with a tangy vinegar/mayo dressing). We put probably 50-60 quart bags in the freezer. Lots of broccolli to get through the year. Oh,and we kept a lot of the stocks for making broccolli cheese soup, which we had a couple of weeks ago and it was AWESOME! :)

Oh Harvest, Our Harvest

Saturday was the last day of the garden. We had a hard freeze this week, and the potatoes died big time. But we were hoping if we left it sit, it might dry out a little, but it didn't, so we took saturday and harvested everything. Dad, Justin and I spent about an hour or so digging potatoes and beets. And carrying plants over to the chickens. We ended up with about 120-130 pounds of really, really nice red potatoes, most of them about weighing at least a pound EACH. It was fantastic. Our Yukon golds didn't do very much, we didn't get hardly any of them, not sure what happened there. But the German butterballs (my favorite potatoes) did pretty good. They would have done better if they had been in a less shady spot. But they still did good. I think we'll can some of them at some point, haven't tried that yet, but it sounds good. Then we got about 20 pounds of beets, which I didn't take a picture of. I thought we would have more, and I was planning for canned beets, and pickeld beets, and frozen beets, and..........I think we'll have beets a couple times this week, and be all done. lol. But anyway, we had about 230-250 pounds of potatoes, 20 lbs. beets, about 60 quarts of broccolli, and a bunch of canned fish and veggie pickles. A pretty productive fall considering how much other stuff we've had going on. Now we all have the flu, but hopefully we'll get over that soon. its kind of a weird flu. hope it passes quickly. Well - there's our harvest anyway. :)